Heat in the Kitchen
by ilexx
Summary: Happy birthday, Mary Rose! Which means for the rest of you B/D, ship-alert and so on.


I don't own Andromeda.

Happy Birthday, Mary Rose!

Set after Saving Light From a Black Sun. And yes, B/D, ship-alert and everything...

**Heat in the Kitchen**

"Dylan, thanks."

He looked at her surprised.

"For what?"

"For believing me about Trance," Beka said quietly. "I mean, the way things are between you and her..." _Not to mention you and me._.. she mentally added, refraining though from saying it loud.

He sighed, slightly annoyed. _Not again __that __stupid 'you need Trance more than me'-talk_, he thought.

"Beka," he spoke up though, "of course I believe you. I trust you."

"You trust her, too. And it is, after all, just a case of her word against mine."

"Yeah, but you're you. And she is the amnesiac avatar of a sun messed up by the Vedrans."

"I'm a former smuggler, a renegade, a..."

He laughed, sounding genuinely amused.

"Okay, okay... I get the picture: you're a bad girl. But hey! We've already established that – out of them all – you picked me to stick to. And I've always been one of the nice boys," he joked, mimicking the utmost self-absorbed expression of a guy totally pleased with himself. Seeing it, Beka couldn't help laughing back at him.

"You mean: you can compensate?"

"Piece of pie, Captain Valentine," Dylan whispered, bowing towards her conspiratorially, "piece of pie!"

"Right," Beka grinned, remembering Trance's mistake from when she was purple. But then she saw Dylan turning serious again. "What?" she asked.

"Umm, listen. I do believe you, really. I do, but we need to sit down and talk properly about this. You have to tell me exactly what happened on that sun. And Doyle, maybe you could too..." he added, turning to the Seefran android, who had silently been observing the light banter from her station.

"I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, Dylan," she said apologetically. "All of it happened while I was out of it. Trance seemed a bit odd ever since, but... I can't **detect** anything out of the ordinary," she stressed, with a helpless shrug towards Beka. The pilot nodded.

"I know." She sighed, an inward look in her eyes. But then she seemed to shake it of and turned back to Dylan:

"Okay. Shall we do it now?"

"No, Doyle and I have to go down to see Harper right now. And the way things are I'd... rather not leave Trance alone on the _Andromeda_."

"Of course," Beka agreed. "I'll stay."

"I'll send Rhade later to relieve you. How about we do this over dinner?"

If the casual invitation startled the captain of the _Eureka Maru_, Doyle couldn't really tell. Beka's face did not betray any surprise, in any case. In fact, she looked rather pleased.

"Sure, but... I'll take the _Maru _and come down to you. Why don't you join me there whenever you are ready? I'll cook us something and then we can sit down and talk."

If Beka's face had not shown any sign of perplexity, Dylan's made up for it.

"What?" he asked, bewilderment evident in his voice.

"We'll talk over dinner..." Beka repeated, smiling at his reaction.

"Yes, but... Cooking? Beka, you don't cook. You burn things, you're the only person I ever met who can burn even tea. She burns, but she doesn't cook," he concluded with a helplessly explanatory look at Doyle.

"Hey! Watch it, buster! You're about to lose again all favours you have gained so far..." Beka warned him with a grin. He smiled down on her, faking an inner struggle to come to terms with her proposal.

"Okay, all right, whatever! Hell, I survived a black hole, I can make it through a meal of yours..." Laughingly, he avoided a playful slap of Beka's aimed at his butt and turned around to leave.

"Doyle, I'll be ready to go in about half an hour. Meet me in hangar 12, please," he said on his way out.

/

Doyle was smiling.

"Who would have thought!? Harper was right after all!" she exclaimed.

Beka threw her a questioning look.

"Harper was right with what?" she asked.

"He explained to me some months ago his theory about how... this constant fighting going on between you and Dylan is just... a way to express your..." She seemed to be looking for the right word.

"Affection for each other?" Beka helped her out.

"Yes," Doyle nodded, "something like that."

"It is," the woman admitted.

Doyle shook her head, slightly puzzled.

"I still don't quite get it, but... if it's the way you want it..." She threw her friend a weighing look. "Or isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean..." Again the android seemed a bit at a loss. This time though Beka didn't help her out, staring at her in silence with a slightly malicious, smug look on her face.

"I mean, if you like him so much" the Seefrane finally dared, "why don't you... you know..."

"Shag him?" Beka finally offered bluntly. She chuckled, seeing the avatar blushing. _Oh dear_, she thought amused, _I wonder if this is some of Rommie's old daintiness or if Harper endowed her with prude antics of her own._ "Not likely," she then told Doyle dryly.

Another weighing look hit her.

"But you think him sexy..."

Beka shrugged.

"And handsome," the android added.

The pilot nodded again.

"And clever," Doyle went on.

"Yeees...?"

"Funny, too?"

The _Maru_'s captain fixed her in silence, with a small pout.

"He is furthermore reliable, gentle, a good fighter, can get things organised and done, and he..."

"...is also a self-centred, emotionally unstable, pretty dysfunctional, sometimes irascible and scared lost boy aged 347 years," Beka finally interrupted, finishing Doyle enumeration of Dylan's characteristics in a slightly unexpected manner.

"Well," the avatar smirked in a very Harper-ish sort of way, "nobody's perfect..."

The pilot burst out in laughter.

"You're right," she admitted. "I'll... I'll think about it!"

/

He came early, letting himself in and striding through to the tiny kitchen of the old freighter.

"Hey!"

"Hey, Dylan! Oh..."

Beka's eyes widened upon seeing the flower-pot he held in his hand. "For me?" He nodded.

"The least I could do, after all the trouble you went through..."

"You mean the fuelling?"

"No, I mean the cooking," Dylan elaborated with a lopsided grin.

Snapping with a dubiously looking kitchen towel after him, she took the flowers from him with a laugh.

"Thank you, they're very pretty," Beka said, turning away to look for a place to put them, the threw him another look, chuckling.

"What?" Dylan inquired.

"'Not so pretty as you'," she told him.

"I'm sorry?"

"'Not so pretty as you'," she repeated, "or something along these lines, that's what you're supposed to say..."

Her grin deepened as she noticed him blushing lightly. _Doyle forgot 'charming'_, she thought.

"Sit down," Beka decided to put him out of his misery. "We can eat in a minute. There is a bottle on that table. If you could open it..."

"Certainly," Dylan hurriedly accepted, making himself useful. He was pouring some of the Seefran... wine? (he hoped) into their glasses, when Beka arrived with two small plates, placing one in front him and sitting down with the other one for herself.

"It wouldn't have been so much trouble, you know..." she told him in a conversational tone.

"The cooking?"

"Yeah. It's only that I found out, of course only today and **after** I had invited you already, that Harper didn't fix the oven, as I told him. Instead he used the money I gave him for it to get parts for a new, huge vid-screen for his stupid holo-dramas."

"Beka, no offense, but seeing how and how often you cook... we probably need the vid-screen more..." Dylan ventured.

She laughed good-humouredly.

"Careful, cowboy, after having spent half of the afternoon in that kitchen, that's thin ice. Very, very thin ice!" She raised her glass, he followed and they drank.

"Thanks for sparing the time to go with me through all that you observed up there."

"Sure, but let's eat first, shall we? Bon appettite!"

Nodding his thanks, he grabbed for his fork, then seemed to freeze.

"What?" Beka asked him, noticing his reaction. "Don't you like salads for starters?"

"Umm, I do, but..."

"But what?"

"It's... hm, it's... _mauve_?..."

"And?"

"Nothing," he answered hastily. "I always thought that there is not enough mauve food in the universe..."

/

The surprise was complete. They talked about Trance without disagreeing one single time, they discussed everything – past, present and future – without going through one single fight, they laughed, bantered, exchanged stories and, on top of it all, both the wine and the food tasted excellently.

Granted, the salad was mauve, but tasty; the steaks had turned out surprisingly tender ("You do like your meat rare, don't you?" Beka had asked him before throwing something amazingly bloody on the barbecue, and it was in hindsight with slight remorse that he remembered thinking then somewhat desperately that, more than anything else, he preferred his meat dead). And although dessert looked a bit like green mud, it still was delicious. No, _surprise_ didn't quite fit. The word Dylan was looking for was _miracle_.

In the end they even used the vid-screen and watched a silly, hilarious, old Earth-movie of Harper's. Finally Dylan noticed that what had already turned into a long evening was threatening to become almost an early morning. He stood up.

"I... I think I'll better be going..."

"Yes, it's getting awfully late," Beka agreed and stood up, too. "Come on, I'll walk you to the door..."

"You don't have to..."

"I want to..."

They made their way to the _Maru_'s entrance in companionable silence, that threatened to become awkward though as soon as they stopped at the threshold.

Looking deeply into her eyes, Dylan sighed.

"Thank you for a lovely evening, Beka."

"Yeah, it was fun, wasn't it? And no food-poisoning either. Go fish!"

"Maybe..."

"Yes?"

"I was wondering..."

"What?"

"Nothing. Good night, Beka."

"Good night, Dylan."

She stood there, waiting for him to turn around and leave. But he didn't.

"Oh, hell..." he finally exclaimed, his hands going up and closing on her face. Gently, but with determination he pulled her closer to him while bowing down. And kissed her. With a vengeance. Then withdrew almost as abruptly as he had moved into the kiss.

"Yes," Beka said in a strange tone sounding both dry and dreamy.

"You're not," Dylan told her.

"I'm not what?"

"Pretty. You're beautiful, amazing, sexy, handsome, witty, brave, scary and a miracle," he cited breathlessly. "But you're not pretty or sweet or..."

"I get the picture. 'Beautiful, amazing...' and all that other stuff – I can live with that," she interrupted him.

Dylan smiled.

"So can I."

"What now?" she inquired quietly. He shrugged.

"Now we keep on repeating evenings like this one – while we keep on doing all the rest we do, too."

"That's it?"

"That's it," he confirmed. "For starters."

"And that's gonna take how long?" Beka wanted to know.

"I have no idea. For as long as it takes," Dylan replied.

She nodded.

"Fair enough. But you cook next time."

"Sure... Something involving chocolate?"

"You got it!"

"You're on," he said, then bowed down for another kiss. It was gentler, more patient, longer too. And softer, but then it too grew into an all thought-consuming affair, leaving them both gasping for air when it ended – of its own accord, seemingly.

**Yes**! Beka thought to herself, as he turned around and slowly walked away.

"Dylan?"

"Hmm?" He turned around, but didn't come back to her.

"Nice boys don't kiss like that."

In the darkness two rows of white teeth suddenly flashed up in a happy, if slightly feral grin.

"Oh yes, they fucking do!"


End file.
